On October 22nd, The College Board unveiled a new test called "ReadiStep" that will be offered to eighth-graders starting next fall. The goal of the test is to help assess students’ readiness to more rigorous high school and college work. It will not be used as another college admissions tool, as College Board Vice President Lee Jones said ReadiStep "is a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses."

As is the case for nearly every assessment, anti-testing critics wasted no time delivering their predictable, ill-reasoned chorus against the ReadiStep test. John D’Auria, superintendent of schools in Canton, Massachusetts, described the test as being "all about sorting and finding out who the talented are rather than trying to build into young kids the lifelong journey of learning."

The kind of philosophy that Dr. D’Auria and his likeminded colleagues ascribe to is the educational equivalent of playing darts with a blindfold. If you don’t know where kids are in terms of what skills and knowledge they possess, how can you possibly hope to hit a target of lifelong learning and adequately prepare them for more rigorous work? That philosophy has already left our colleges playing the role of a hospital’s emergency room, as their remediation programs treat injured students when those darts inevitably fail to hit their proper targets. Likely, the true objections lie not to a tool for sorting out which students are talented, but rather to another tool for sorting out which schools and districts are doing their jobs and which ones are not.

The College Board set a price of $10 per student for this test. If the voluntary test were given to every eighth-grader in the nation each year, the annual price tag would be about $37 million.  Meanwhile, we waste approximately $3.7 billion each year on remediation programs. You don’t need to be an economist to see the potential return on investment that could be reaped by merely finding out what students actually need. 

It is common sense to exhaust all possible means to provide students with the opportunity to be successful in life. To oppose doing so, for reasons that are questionable at best, speaks volumes to how our nation found itself falling behind on international education benchmarks.